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Could someone explain why there is such a cult following behind these old Amiga machines? I see them mentioned a lot on HN and would like to understand the inte

Could someone explain why there is such a cult following behind these old Amiga machines? I see them mentioned a lot on HN and would like to understand the interest...

pavlov 9y ago
Try these: Ars Technica's History of the Amiga - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-ami... "The Future Was Here" - http://amiga.filfre.net http://amiga.filfre.net
drblast 9y ago
Imagine that tomorrow a company started selling a game console that does VR perfectly. No lag, fully immersive, it just blows everything else out of the water. And it's cheaper than a PlayStation, although sadly few people buy the thing and the company completely mismanages the sales and marketing and it's ten years before another consumer device comes close. That's what the Amiga was like in the 80's.
- pavlov 9y ago
  Just to clarify for those not familiar with the Amiga, it wasn't a game console but a fully featured computer with a custom OS that supported preemptive multitasking a decade before Windows and Mac did. Graphics hardware was just one part of what made the total package so innovative.
  - Flow 9y ago
    I must say I like the static priority of the threads in the AmigaOS. On the fat iMac I use, doing some video conversions in the background makes it impossible to play TF2 at the same time.
blakespot 9y ago
Look at the "Reception" area of the wiki post for one of the Amiga's famous early games, Defender of the Crown. It's a quite from Brian Bagnal's Commodore book that explains to a degree the significance of experiencing the Amiga's graphics way back when. I remember the feeling he describes, well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Crown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Crown Also, I saw this article pop up yesterday that takes a look at "The Amiga Concsiousness." It may help, here. http://countingvirtualsheep.com/the-amiga-consciousness/ http://countingvirtualsheep.com/the-amiga-consciousness/
segmondy 9y ago
Same way there's a cult following behind Lisp, Prolog & APL. They were way ahead of the time. In a different timeline, if they had been marketed well and adopted, the entire industry would be far ahead and better. It makes us sad that things didn't turn out well and entire industry/world was delayed by years if not decades. We keep talking about this as a reminder that popular is not necessarily best. Those that forget the past are bound to repeat the same mistakes again.
boomlinde 9y ago
You have all these 8-bit computers limited to fixed palettes of 8 or 16 colors (except the Atari, MSX2 stuff) at the time. Then you have the Macintosh with its monochrome flat framebuffer, or the IBM with what, four to 16 colors? The Amiga chipset was originally designed as a video game system. Its predecessors were really the Atari 8-bit computer family and the Atari 2600. It had a bunch of coprocessors to accelerate 2D graphics, offloading the CPU for other crap while the graphics chipset handled sprites, video memory copying and merging, and even a simple "line shader" that could update graphics registers on a line-per-line basis independent of the CPU. Add similarly powerful audio hardware with four channels of arbitrary sample playback with per-channel frequency and volume independent of the sample data, and a pre-emptively multitasking operating system in many ways ahead of its time and you have a hell of a computer that can do things with the CPU running cold (the boing ball demo on the Amiga was famously implemented using the blitter hardware to draw the checkered ball and changing the palette once per frame to "rotate" it). Of course, these features became increasingly irrelevant as CPUs got cheaper and faster and could perform the graphics duties of the Aliga adequately in software, and the it didn't keep up. Particularly devastating IMO is that the Amiga uses a bit-plane model for graphics. Essentially, this means that graphics screen is composed of several single-bit per pixel planes that are interleaved to index a palette. This is great for memory consumptions because if you don't need 4 bit graphics for a particular screen, you can use two or three planes. It's awful when it comes to render raycasting columns because it makes each pixel in a comumn based renderer take several writes and reads. So a popular opinion is that Doom killed the Amiga. IMO it was just the final nail in the coffin. I got myself an Amiga 1200 with an accelerator rather late, trading it for a Pentium PC when those went out of fashion, just out of interest. It's a great machine and I still sometimes use it for games, basic internet duties like IRC and... Doom!

Could someone explain why there is such a cult following behind these old Amiga machines? I see them mentioned a lot on HN and would like to understand the interest...

pavlov 9y ago

Try these: Ars Technica's History of the Amiga - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-ami... "The Future Was Here" - http://amiga.filfre.net http://amiga.filfre.net

drblast 9y ago

Imagine that tomorrow a company started selling a game console that does VR perfectly. No lag, fully immersive, it just blows everything else out of the water. And it's cheaper than a PlayStation, although sadly few people buy the thing and the company completely mismanages the sales and marketing and it's ten years before another consumer device comes close. That's what the Amiga was like in the 80's.

pavlov 9y ago
Just to clarify for those not familiar with the Amiga, it wasn't a game console but a fully featured computer with a custom OS that supported preemptive multitasking a decade before Windows and Mac did. Graphics hardware was just one part of what made the total package so innovative.
- Flow 9y ago
  I must say I like the static priority of the threads in the AmigaOS. On the fat iMac I use, doing some video conversions in the background makes it impossible to play TF2 at the same time.

blakespot 9y ago

Look at the "Reception" area of the wiki post for one of the Amiga's famous early games, Defender of the Crown. It's a quite from Brian Bagnal's Commodore book that explains to a degree the significance of experiencing the Amiga's graphics way back when. I remember the feeling he describes, well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Crown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Crown Also, I saw this article pop up yesterday that takes a look at "The Amiga Concsiousness." It may help, here. http://countingvirtualsheep.com/the-amiga-consciousness/ http://countingvirtualsheep.com/the-amiga-consciousness/

segmondy 9y ago

Same way there's a cult following behind Lisp, Prolog & APL. They were way ahead of the time. In a different timeline, if they had been marketed well and adopted, the entire industry would be far ahead and better. It makes us sad that things didn't turn out well and entire industry/world was delayed by years if not decades. We keep talking about this as a reminder that popular is not necessarily best. Those that forget the past are bound to repeat the same mistakes again.

boomlinde 9y ago

You have all these 8-bit computers limited to fixed palettes of 8 or 16 colors (except the Atari, MSX2 stuff) at the time. Then you have the Macintosh with its monochrome flat framebuffer, or the IBM with what, four to 16 colors? The Amiga chipset was originally designed as a video game system. Its predecessors were really the Atari 8-bit computer family and the Atari 2600. It had a bunch of coprocessors to accelerate 2D graphics, offloading the CPU for other crap while the graphics chipset handled sprites, video memory copying and merging, and even a simple "line shader" that could update graphics registers on a line-per-line basis independent of the CPU. Add similarly powerful audio hardware with four channels of arbitrary sample playback with per-channel frequency and volume independent of the sample data, and a pre-emptively multitasking operating system in many ways ahead of its time and you have a hell of a computer that can do things with the CPU running cold (the boing ball demo on the Amiga was famously implemented using the blitter hardware to draw the checkered ball and changing the palette once per frame to "rotate" it). Of course, these features became increasingly irrelevant as CPUs got cheaper and faster and could perform the graphics duties of the Aliga adequately in software, and the it didn't keep up. Particularly devastating IMO is that the Amiga uses a bit-plane model for graphics. Essentially, this means that graphics screen is composed of several single-bit per pixel planes that are interleaved to index a palette. This is great for memory consumptions because if you don't need 4 bit graphics for a particular screen, you can use two or three planes. It's awful when it comes to render raycasting columns because it makes each pixel in a comumn based renderer take several writes and reads. So a popular opinion is that Doom killed the Amiga. IMO it was just the final nail in the coffin. I got myself an Amiga 1200 with an accelerator rather late, trading it for a Pentium PC when those went out of fashion, just out of interest. It's a great machine and I still sometimes use it for games, basic internet duties like IRC and... Doom!